Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking to the report of the Standing Committee on Procedure on sessional orders—both seeing sessional orders that have been in existence become permanent standing orders and seeing a review of current sessional orders—I want to speak more broadly about the role of the Procedure Committee. Members of the Procedure Committee who have already spoken have outlined the sorts of changes that the committee has recommended, but I would like to begin by commending the work done by the chair, Margaret May, and by the other members of the committee, who take the work of monitoring the procedures of both the House and the Main Committee very seriously and see it as an integral and important aspect of ensuring that the business of the House is progressed more and more in a timely way and affords ordinary members more opportunity to speak and to represent their constituencies. I think it is fair to say that without the invention, if you like, of this second chamber there is no way in the world that this parliament could dispose of its work in the main chamber. We would have to sit many more days in order to achieve the same amount of work if we had not worked out a way for this second chamber to come into existence.

It still remains very confusing to many people and it was only this morning that I had cause to explain to a number of folk when we were discussing booking the main committee room that that is not this room—it is the room on the first floor with the tiers of seating and the large mural—and that this room is the designated chamber where we conduct business of the House using the method of sitting as the committee of the whole of the parliament. Therefore when we are dealing with detailed sections of a bill we no longer resolve ourselves into a committee of the whole for the purposes of debating each clause of a bill. We now leave the speaker in the chair and discuss the bill in detail, thereby reserving this committee-of-the-whole structure to enable us to conduct a lot more business.

We have developed that slowly but surely so that now, although we take no vote in this chamber, we are able, as the previous speaker, the member for Charlton, pointed out, to take disciplinary action, if you like, if there is disorderly conduct in this particular place, which I hope will soon be referred to as the federation chamber so that people know exactly where we are and what we are doing. We have developed the very useful practice whereby committee reports being tabled in the main chamber are now referred here virtually immediately so that the debate is concurrent with the introduction and tabling of the report. Delegation reports, which were regarded very often by people as a nuisance, now have a place to be properly debated. So gradually this place is becoming not only a functioning chamber, that allows us not to have to sit extra days away from our constituencies and to progress work, but also an innovative chamber.

It is in here that any member across the way from me could, if they wished, stand up and ask me a question about what I am saying now or in any other debate that we were having. It would be within my rights to deny answer to that question if I did not want to take it, but equally it is adding to the interaction of the debate across the chamber which we, as a committee, have felt has been sadly lacking. We would very much like to see the introduction in the chamber itself of the practice where, in a second reading debate, five minutes of a 20-minute speech would be forgone and the last five minutes would be available for people to ask questions of the speaker about what they have said.

Coming as I did originally from the Senate, I found it quite surprising when I came into this House that there was no standing order that prevented people reading speeches. It is not permitted in the Senate but it is permitted in the House. I personally find that a disincentive to seeing a better debating structure and people engaging with each other and having rebuttal, even in a second reading debate, which I feel could occur if the standing orders were different. However, I know that that would be quite a radical step for many.

In rising to speak to this report and to endorse the comments made by other members of the committee outlining the work that has been done and recommending which sessional orders should remain—whether the existing sessional orders that we presently have in force should remain as permanent standing orders—I really wanted to highlight the fact that we have been quite innovative in developing these new methods of procedures. It is an enormous compliment to this parliament that the British parliament has followed us in the establishment of a second chamber. This is the second time to my knowledge that that has occurred. I remember leading a delegation to London in 1999 dealing with delegated legislation, and the scrutiny of bills practice that we had built up in this parliament was subsequently adopted by the British parliament. So although we have inherited the Westminster system and our parliamentary procedures are based on that, we have taken it, via the Procedure Committee, along a track that has made us far more innovative and worthy of copying by our more established Westminster predecessor. I think that the chair and members of this committee can feel very proud of the work that they continue to do in monitoring the workings of the parliament and finding ways in which we can be innovative in developing a better interaction in debate and a more workable set of standing orders that meet the needs of the day and have prevented us having to sit more days by carrying out so much of our work now in this second chamber.

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